AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN MALAYSIA: A BACKGROUND
Journal Title: International Journal of Research in Social Sciences - Year 2017, Vol 7, Issue 8
Abstract
The history of Malaya goes back for nearly two thousand years. In the early Christian era it was an outpost of the Hindu civilization of India; in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was brought within Islam. In early 16th century, Portuguese conquered Malacca. They were to rule here for a century till 1611, when the Dutch captured Malacca. An opportunity for the British came in the last decades of the 18th century when the Dutch Empire began to weaken. When the British took over Malaya, the latter was virtually a primitive jungle land with no accumulated capital of its own. The Malays were fond of living subsistence life through agriculture and fishing activities, and were thus called “Nature’s gentlemen” (Li 1955: 84). However, the British had come for trade and economic activities. The vast natural resources of Malaya, particularly tin and rubber, assumed great economic significance for the colonial rulers. They now started looking for cheap laborers to work in tin mining and rubber plantations, the two centers around which the economic history of Malaya has evolved. When the British tried to persuade the Malays for the purpose, they refused to do so. The Malays though hard-working enough on their rice fields and in their orchards, were disinclined to the routine drudgery of mines or plantations (Purcell 1945: 36); instead they preferred living with subsistence economy that provided enough for their livelihood (Sandhu 1962: 46). Moreover, the Malays were quite happy with the vast natural endowment they had and did not want to work as laborers due to the tropical climate. This naturally led the British rulers to turn to the world’s two largest labor reservoirs, China and India. Favorable immigration policies were framed to encourage Chinese and Indian migration to work in tin mining and rubber estates respectively.
Authors and Affiliations
Promod Singh
Keywords
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